My research

Mitochondria are essential organelles with their own DNA, and required to convert food into usable chemical energy. Mitochondria have also a distinct translation system, highly diverse from the cytoplasmic one, with its unique ribosomes (mitoribosomes), which are fundamental for mitochondrial function.

From the medical perspective, the upregulation of mitochondrial translation has been found to occur in a subset of human malignancies, and inhibition of mitochondrial protein translation showed anticancer activity in preclinical studies. In addition, several strains of human parasites have a dissimilar mitochondrial translation from human counterparts. Hence characterization of protein synthesis in mitochondria of cancer cells and human parasites can provide therapeutically useful information.

Since the most definitive way to understand molecular mechanisms is to directly visualize the involved components by obtaining their 3D atomic structures, Alexey Amunts propose to employ the most recent advances in electron cryo-microscopy in order to provide fundamental insights into the mitochondrial translation process with emphasize on the aspects which are likely to be relevant to medicine.